a main reason why unca carl gave up is that the dell board of directors played like washington politics in __changing the rules of the vote__ so that it (the upcoming vote to approve a buyout bid) favors dell's takeover bid over his... another is that carl's choice of ceo (name unknown, never released publicly?) backed out at last minute.

Carl's plan is never to bring Dell to its full potential. He is the M&A expert to break a company down. The only reason Carl is retreating is either it is an utter defeat, or the fact that someone paid him in some form or fashion that he no longer needs to play hardball on Dell's deal.

Frankly I think Mike is crazy. Dell has lots fronts open that have big dollar costs. Even if your competition is inept like HP, Dell has better odds as a public company raising the money to compete.

Mike seems to want to focus on the PC/Server spaces again there is no money there.

Storage, Managed Security Services, could easily bleed the company dry if it has to use financing to pay for the R&D efforts. One misstep that puts them out for a "generation" of storage or something and it could be curtains.

yea, but public companies tend to bust. You can shrink a private company, take losses for a while if you want. When you're public the public expects eternal growth or they abandon you, you get bought up and sold for pennies on the dollar and then the company you named after yourself sells its rights to walmart who then sells cheap knock-offs under your name.

Their business line of laptops still comes with NBD onsite warranty. If it was as shitty as you claim, they'd be bankrupt.

I have a 2-year old Vostro v130n laptop that still works like the day I bought it. The only part that isn't original is the hard drive, and that's not because it failed, it's because I wanted to switch to an SSD.

True. Some analyst expects you to grow by 15% but then you only grow by 14% and find a massive stock sell off. Being public is a pain, it's mostly only done these days to make some big short term money. Too much value is being placed on the potential for growth (short term speculation) rather than the ability to pay dividends (long term investment).

The PC market is shrinking but it won't vanish or even become negligible. They make decent computers (not sure about laptops, but the desktops I've gotten re

When you're public the public expects eternal growth or they abandon you, you get bought up and sold for pennies on the dollar...

Essentially what happened with Dell Inc here (just MSDell is looting the company), minus the other half of your sentence. Assuming Dell's situation is as precarious as the prostit- err "professional directors" of the board claim, perhaps the debt load to fund the buyout could bankrupt them (especially if economy -- corporate/government spending especially -- dives) and maybe we would see the other half yet, but doubtful. He has an inside seat and is laughing to the bank on pulling a steal versus him having

On Wallstreet, public companies must always maximize short term profits, whereas private companies can make decisions to ensure long-term profitability. Hopefully, in a big corporation, maximizing short-term profits will also maximize long-term profits. However, that does not always occur.

A good example of the difference in strategy is the American auto industry. The public companies (GM, Ford, Chrysler) routinely underperform, and often lose money. However, lots of privately held or privately controlled companies consistently make money. Magna is a good example of this. These companies keep a lid on their costs, and do not do anything to impair the long-term profits of the company.

I was at an analysts presentation on the mistakes GM, Ford, and Chrysler made. Every single mistake involved optimizing short-term profits at the expense of long-term profits. Individually, none of these decisions would have bankrupted GM. However, after a pattern of decades of short-term optimization, GM was broke.

If Dell wants to compete with HP, they only need to accept a 0.25% less per year return on investment than Wall Street. A private investor can make that decision, because he knows that if the company is well-managed, then the investment will pay off.

Having access to cheap capital in a discipllined, well-managed company is a huge advantage. The big companies engage in endlessly complicated financial manipulations to boost short-term profits. In a private company the decision is easy: focus on outcomes that maximize the long-term success of the company.

In a well-managed private company, there is no Enron-like manipulations that destroy the long-term shareholder value.
Thus, Dell can adopt a strategy where it ensures its products are competitive and sell, and then wait for HP to implode. After some of HP's recent CEOs, it is a probably a safe bet that HP will implode. That would leave Dell as the only large North American PC vendor, which would be a pretty nice place to be (for Dell).

Many of those companies have the "Reduce cost at any expense" mantra well learned.Causing them to spend more money on the reduction than the savings from the reduction, on paper it looks good, in reality you are destroying the company.

When a company goes public, it allows professional gamblers buy parts of the company in order to raise money. At this point, these gamblers demand that the company post regular results and news no matter how silly to give them some reason why other gamblers should buy these shares... or vouchers for a higher value. The value of this voucher on the gambling market almost never reflect the actual performance of the company. And the gambler market value has little actual impact on the actual value of the company. It's similar in nature to how betting on a horse doesn't make it run faster. Gambling on a football game doesn't actually alter the results of the game.

When a company like Dell volunteers to remove itself from the gambling pool because the people who run it feel they'd prefer the value of the company is actually based on the actual results of its performance, it is highly responsible. Like paying off a loan to the bank because you don't need the loan anymore.

While every experience I've ever had with Dell has been that they're a company full of hackers who lack the ability to do anything other than repackage technology they don't actually understand, I applaud them for setting a great example of financial responsibility even against the will of gamblers who pressure them to behave irresponsibly for their own personal gains.

I would like to see many other companies take the same path. Other tech companies, food companies, manufacturing companies, etc. The first step to fixing the U.S. economy is to gamble less and behave responsibly.

When a company like Dell volunteers to remove itself from the gambling pool because the people who run it feel they'd prefer the value of the company is actually based on the actual results of its performance, it is highly responsible. Like paying off a loan to the bank because you don't need the loan anymore.

But that's not the reason he's doing this. The reason he's doing this is because he knows the only way to save the company is to make some decisions about which shareholders will freak the hell out. He knows that, so long as he and the board are forced to answer to shareholders, there's no way he can implement the changes he wants to because they will, at least in the short to medium term, be very bad for the bottom dollar and will tank the share price. I have little to no doubt that he believes this course

the guy is a greenmailer, pure and simple. other men, better men, say instead, "nice place ya got here, shame if anyting would happen to it, cabish?" while flicking ashes on all the papers on the desk.

If Icahn believes Dell is worth more than thirteen bucks a share, then he's not paying attention. Dell has already pissed away everything that made them successful in the first place. They got where they are by pioneering a highly-efficient build-to-order process, and for quite a while they had the best tech support in the DOS/Windows world. Those advantages are long gone.